When Both Sides Miss the Point: What Revelation Actually Teaches About Salvation

I got saved when I was 12 years old. At least I think it was about 12—I can't quite remember the exact moment. Growing up in one of those Baptocostal churches (you know the ones), walking the aisle to ask to be born again was considered the ultimate moment of surrender. It was stepping past the edges of logic and into the country of hope, faith, and love.

What I remember most clearly about those teenage years after that decision was developing this insatiable hunger for the Bible. I'd spend hours during summer break sitting at this little desk in my parents' bedroom, reading scripture and pouring over my mother's commentaries. And here's the thing that will probably surprise you: the first book I ever systematically studied was Revelation.

I know, I know. What kind of teenager chooses the Bible's weirdest book as their starting point? But I dove in, encountering every problematic way of reading that text you can imagine. I assumed Revelation predicted things I needed to know about the future—secrets that would unlock the timeline of the end times. While I never got sucked into the Left Behind series, I definitely approached Revelation as a puzzle to be solved, a code to be cracked.

Here's what my teenage self never understood, and what I want to make absolutely clear as we near the end of our sermon series on Revelation: this book is a salvation story. It's a vision of how the world will be made right, a confident assertion that injustice will ultimately be answered, a promise that one day heaven will collide with earth in joyous union.

And without understanding Revelation as a salvation story, we'll never become the kind of dissident disciples this book calls us to be—the kind who can worship, testify, resist, and endure no matter what.

The Language of Salvation (And Why We Struggle With It)

Let's be honest: for many of us, the language of salvation is hard to swallow. It's language that's been weaponized for coercion, used to separate those deemed worthy of paradise from those deemed worthy of disposal. For some of us, "salvation talk" doesn't promise good news—it warns us of bad news, triggers memories of manipulation and inauthenticity.

This is where Eugene Peterson (whose book Reverse Thunder I cannot recommend highly enough) offers us something really helpful. He reminds us that the root meaning of salvation in Hebrew is to be broad, to become spacious, to enlarge. It carries the sense of deliverance from an existence that has become compressed, confined, and cramped.

**"To be saved biblically is to be liberated into a kind of spaciousness, a kind of wideness." **

Think about that for a moment. We've spent so much energy conceptualizing salvation as a narrow gate you have to squeeze through if you believe exactly the right things. But the actual Hebrew concept is the opposite—it's about expansion, about breathing room, about being liberated from whatever has made your existence small and airless.

For me personally, the mental shorthand I use comes from Jesus' prayer in John's Gospel, just before his arrest: "As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they be in us" (John 17:21). I think of salvation as being caught up and committed to the spacious Trinitarian life of God—a communion of love, self-giving, and mutuality.

On the cosmic level, I return to Paul's vision in 1 Corinthians 15, where salvation looks like the hope that "God may be all in all." And in Revelation's final pages, salvation ultimately looks like heaven coming down to unite with earth. Not us escaping earth to get to heaven, but heaven descending to transform everything.

Two Reactions to Empire's Downfall (And Why Both Miss the Mark)

In Revelation 18, we encounter the judgment and fall of Babylon—which the text identifies as both the Roman Empire specifically and every centralizing, dominating, acquisitive empire generally. Chapter 17 has already characterized Babylon by its idolatry, extravagance, status consciousness, murder, militarism, economic exploitation, and arrogance. Now in chapter 18, we see it fall.

And we get to overhear two very different reactions to this downfall. The first voice is deeply desirous of justice and frankly gleeful about empire getting what it deserves: "Render to her as she herself has rendered, and repay her double for her deeds" (Revelation 18:6). This voice wants the sharp edges of the biblical promise that the first will be last and the last will be first. It feels triumphant that Babylon will finally face consequences.

When I was sitting with this passage, I kept thinking about a story Dr. Christina Cleveland shares about the Black Madonna statues found all over the world. The Black Madonna of Paris, known as Our Lady of Good Deliverance, has been sought out by countless people hoping to get pregnant and have safe childbirths. But unofficially, she's known as a deliverer from evil.

There are several variations of a story about women in abusive relationships—women who in that era couldn't get divorces—coming to pray before this statue in desperation. And after these women pray, their husbands are never, ever seen again. Dr. Cleveland calls this Madonna statue "Our Lady of Mess Around and Find Out" (except she doesn't use the word "mess"—you know what word she uses).

That's the energy of this first response to empire's fall: finally, comeuppance. Finally, justice. Finally, consequences for those who've caused harm.

But then we hear a second voice—the kings, merchants, and seafarers who profited from empire. They weep at Babylon's demise, mourning the loss of their cargo: gold, silver, jewels, fine linen, silk, ivory, wine, olive oil, wheat, cattle... and then, almost casually at the end of the list: "slaves, and human lives" (Revelation 18:13).

The effect of these descriptions is to clarify the sins of empire in every age. They create economies of luxury at the expense of actual human lives. They sustain exploitation through trading relationships. They are ruled by desire for delicacies, investing in grand architectural plans for the few while the many stand in line for basic necessities like bread. (I'm just saying. I'm just saying.) Peterson writes that these mourners "got everything they wanted. Their lives overflowed with things and now it is gone, wasted up in smoke." But here's his crucial insight: "It is not their businesses that collapsed, but their religion. A religion of self-indulgence, of getting."

One reaction teeters on the brink of vengeance. The other mourns the loss of self-indulgent, self-centered lives—lives that some of us live, but which many more of us dream about.

The Problem With Progressive Christianity (Yes, I'm Going There)

So we've got two problematic responses to empire's fall in Revelation 18. But before we rush to point fingers at Christian nationalism and right-wing idolatry of the state—which, to be clear, Revelation absolutely does expose as blasphemous—I want to talk about what this book says to progressive Christians.

A few years back, I had a conversation with a regular attender at our church that really disrupted my thinking. When I used the label "progressive" for our community, she told me she hated that phrasing and much preferred "liberation Christianity." For her, the progressive frame was a stand-in for toothless Christianity.

I thought about her comment a lot. The foundation of progressivism is the idea that humans will continually advance upward from primitive awareness to ever higher levels of culture, knowledge, and technology. It's a salvation narrative, really—just one where we save ourselves through moral progress and enlightened thinking.

But the images of Revelation remind us that salvation is not ultimately about making endless progress through our own work. It's not about obtaining political power, whether in service of the right or the left. It's not finally about our morality, whether grounded in the pursuit of holiness or the pursuit of justice. It's about being liberated by God and collaborating with God in the liberation of others.

Chapters 6 through 19 in Revelation are full of cries from all those who have been unjustly killed. Their endless cries from beneath the altar haunt the action of the book. Yet too often as progressive Christians, we carry this false belief that if we can just ask the right questions or read enough books, we can somehow figure out suffering. We can solve the problem of evil. We can think our way to justice. ** "When we treat suffering as an intellectual problem, all that happens is that our doubts and questions pile up. And as they pile up, our faith becomes fatigued."**

Richard Beck makes this point so well: when we deny in word or practice that our battle is beyond flesh and blood, we shrink the horizon of salvation. We trade raucous cries of deliverance for logical calculations that never quite compute. We make it so the rider on the white horse—no matter how larger-than-life Revelation paints him—is denied and dismissed in light of our own plans.

Instead of an open heaven, we get a flat universe. In trying to be our own saviors, we rid the world of genuine salvation—the kind that can only come from outside in ways that cannot be explained.

What Salvation Actually Looks Like (Spoiler: It's Bigger Than You)

So if salvation isn't about achieving the right political outcomes or figuring out all the answers, what is it?

In Revelation 19, for the first time in the entire book, we hear the word "Hallelujah." The great multitude, the 24 elders, the four living creatures, voices from the very throne room of God—they all break into praise. And the salvation they announce includes both a meal and a confrontation. Both the marriage supper of the Lamb and the rider on the white horse.

Let me be absolutely clear about something: these images are extremely graphic (keep reading, come back next week), but they are not literal. Jesus is not Rambo. His robe is dipped in his own blood—and maybe the blood of faithful martyrs—but not the blood of his enemies. The weapon he uses comes from his mouth: the prophetic word that challenges, corrects, and liberates.

These images aren't literal, but they are true. And they inoculate us against any version of Christianity that can be tamed, managed, or domesticated into our own plans.

Revelation calls us to four things, over and over: worship, testimony, resistance, and endurance. More specifically: worshiping the Lamb, faithfully giving testimony with words and actions to the Lamb Jesus, resisting empire and the evil behind empire, and enduring in our allegiance to the Lamb no matter what.

This is what it means to be dissident disciples. Not people who have all the answers. Not people who've achieved moral perfection or political power. But people who have received what they cannot explain—who've been liberated into spaciousness—and who therefore can act in faith even when logic fails.

Receiving What Cannot Be Explained

I started this reflection by telling you about getting saved at 12 and reading Revelation as a teenager. What I didn't tell you was about the other moments—the ones before and after that decision to walk the aisle. Moments when I received what I could not explain. Like being nine years old and hearing a Tramaine Hawkins song in church that touched me so deeply I wept for hours. Like being 15 and going forward for prayer, only to have my legs give out and feel this sensation of floating on an ocean of love and joy.

These weren't moments I engineered. They weren't the result of asking the right questions or reading the right books. They were moments of receiving—of being opened up to something bigger than myself, something that could only be described as grace.

And that's what Revelation is ultimately about. Not giving us a timeline of future events we can control. Not offering a political platform we can implement. But showing us a vision of salvation so big, so cosmic, so beyond our capacity to manufacture, that the only appropriate response is worship.

The fact that salvation is bigger than we are? That's actually good news. It means we can stop trying to be our own saviors. We can stop exhausting ourselves with endless calculations and moral scorekeeping. We can receive what cannot be explained and learn to act in faith anyway.